AT&T is replacing its current
$30/month unlimited data plan with DataPlus and DataPro. DataPlus
will give users access to 200MB of data a month for only $15/month.
If customers go over the 200MB cap, they will be charged $15 for
another 200MB of data instead of the currently outrageous per/MB
overage charges.

The new top-ranging data plan is called
DataPro and gives users a monthly cap of 2GB for $25/month. Once
customers fly past their monthly cap, AT&T will charge an
additional $10 for another gigabyte of data. For example, if a
customer uses 2.01GB of data, you'll be charged $35.

For those that only use relatively
small amounts of data, but see a spike in usage for some reason, AT&T
makes it easy to switch between the DataPlus and DataPro plans. If
you start off with the DataPlus plan during the month and see that
you are starting to exceed your monthly allotment, you can switch to
DataPro at any time and have the charge pro-rated or have it apply
retroactively to start of your currently active billing cycle.

As for you future iPad owners out
there, the $30 unlimited data plan is also getting axed and replaced
with the $25 DataPro package.

Now before all of AT&T's current
customers start panicking, AT&T is grandfathering in customers
already on the current $30 unlimited data plan. If you would like to
keep using as much data as you want, don't change a thing and go
about your business as usual. You can switch to the DataPlus or
DataPro at any time, but you'll likely lose the ability to ever go
back to the unlimited data plan.

For its part, AT&T feels that these
new plans are better for customers because 65 percent use less than
200MB/month and 98 percent use less than 2GB/month making the lower
pricing more palatable.

“AT&T helps mobilize everything
on the Internet – your favorite web sites, TV shows, music, games
and social networks. Virtually everything previously done while
sitting at a computer can now be done on the go,” said Ralph de la
Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “To
give more people the opportunity to experience these benefits, we’re
breaking free from the traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ pricing
model and making the mobile Internet more affordable to a greater
number of people.”

All of the new changes go into effect
June 7.

On a final note, AT&T has also
announced that iPhone users will gain access to tethering with the
release of iPhone OS 4.0. It will be available to DataPro subscribers
for an additional $20/month. In a cruel twist, it appears that the
only way to legally obtain tethering is to go with the DataPro plan –
so if you're currently on an unlimited plan (which lends itself
nicely to tethering) you'll have to switch to the inferior DataPro
plan and never look back.

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Appropriate, since your wallet will be as empty as the space where alderaan was after AT&Ts super laser shot at it. Between the $325 ETFs and the iPhone 4G, guess you're still gonna need some deep pockets to play with the big boy phones

Sprints really gunning for the teleco deathstar title after that whole '$10 extra for WiMAX most of you can't use!' with the 4G evo though.

quote: Sprints really gunning for the teleco deathstar title after that whole '$10 extra for WiMAX most of you can't use!' with the 4G evo though.

ill pay the extra $10 a month for the 4g in fact i will starting friday

we (at this house) go well beyond AT&T caps and dont get charged extra from sprint...i have an ftp server where my family can download around a terabytes worth of movies and music from anywhere and at anytime, we feel like watching them...

Wow, have I got this straight, 2% of their customers can put the giant AT&T out to pasture by taxing their system to death.That would be the last company I would want to hook up with. Secondly the PR is at work here. When was the last time you can remember a company giving their customers a good deal. Bean counters don't get hired to give customers deals their hired to make sure the shareholders get the best pay back. No company gives consumers a deal if it hits their bottom line. So wheres the real deal here.

Man I miss the days where people were outraged when ATT made 600 million in 1 year. Now there making 2 to 4 BILLION A QUATER!! and that just isn't enough.

I don't understand how I can get electricity to my house for less then my cell phone bill. Considering the massive cost to get fuel out of the ground transport it to power plant and maintain them. There is also the cost of maintain all the towers, poles, and millions of miles of wire where a percentage of that gets destroyed by mother nature and has to be repaired and sometimes rebuilt year after year.

How is it possible that unmanned cell towers that can serve 200k calls at a time and only require maintenance, where data is 10 cents a gig (last time I checked), cost more then my power bill? I have 2 lines one smart phone and 1 basic phone with text messaging. BTW before my wife had a texting plan we paid 20 cents a message which is 1600 dollars a MEGABYTE!!! with a text plan it's still 32 dollars A MEGABYTE. That's not business that's theft plain and simple.

We are being raped with ice picks and baseball bats and we just take it. Lower cost to the consumer is supposed to be one of the benefits of a free market system. Clearly something is wrong here.

How about they use the billions they made from the users that use almost no data a month and make their network at least work correctly? Also do the math yourself. It cost them 10 cents a gigabyte that's 50 cents lost for someone to use the full 5GB of the unlimited plan. Let's see $29.50 isn't enough profit? Honestly you subtract the cost to keep the network running and the customer service costs to help the millions of morons. They're still making $20 profit just off the data plans.

Anyone that tries to defend these type of actions is delusional. This is simply a money grab. They want to give us less while they make more. See my post bellow for some logic on this. This is just a completely new way to rape us harder for the crap they call a service.

With 4G both voice and data are the same. It is just VoIP. and even 3G is still a digital network meaning voice is just data. Analog hasn't been used for a long while now. Voice is data. Bits are bits, it doesn't matter what the bits add up to because they're still bits.

Ya know, I am wondering how correct those statistics are. We all know ATT has had trouble with their network being bogged down so this is a logical step for them to keep that from happening. To keep them from looking like the bad guy why dont they just exaggerate the numbers to make it look like 2GB is plenty for nearly everyone on their network? Just speculating here...

Almost certainly.. Every big corporation has statistics upon statistics upon statistics... Some geeky data miner almost certainly passed the info along to someone with several yachts and that someone made the call...

The guy who did F' up was the one who said, "well, the iPhone won't significantly tax our existing cell network, it will be a niche product..." I hope that guy had to sell his yachts..

That may be true now, but who knows what those numbers will be by the end of a newly signed 2 year contract. With faster networks and better featured phones, data consumption is only going up. It can't take too many HQ Youtube videos to hit the 200MB mark.

The numbers seem correct but if that is the case then why make the change? Wouldn't they stand to make more even if a few users abuse the system? I mean $30/month from everyone is better than $15/month from 65% of your smart phone users and $25/month from the other 35%. Is is really logical to lose the insane amount of profit to stop the 2% from abusing unlimited plans? And really it can't be considered abuse because it is unlimited.

Going to metered pricing is going backwards. The price per gigabyte on 4G is even cheaper. If other carriers follow suite I'd have to say that is a form of price fixing and we'll need the FTC to investigate because if the price is going down then there is no reason to limit data usage more. I mean its only logical. As the cost per Gigabyte goes down the amount of data allotted should go up not down.

I sincerely hope other carriers don't follow AT&T's lead on this, definitely not a fan of metered Internet. It has no place in the modern information age.

On a slightly positive note though, AT&T allows users to keep the unlimited(5Gb) plan. I imagine though, that if they want to purchase a new phone at a subsidized price, a new contract will be required and boot you from the 5Gb plan. Better stockpile some cash to pay up the full price for a new phone.

Actually, I was just about to leave ATT, but now I'll stay. I just want access to e-mail, nav functions, and a little web. Didn't want to pay $30/month for it though. At $15/month, I'll think I'll go ahead and stay. Might even get me one of those Walmart iphones and give my wife the blackberry. Don't need the 4G speed right now, I'm usually within laptop distance.This may actually push a lot of other people to ATT, or at least keep some that were looking elsewhere.This is really just a way to cut the (really) unlimited folks out without making the rest of the customers leave in droves. I think when most people check their usage, they'll stick with ATT.

I'm with Verizon, but would welcome a move like this. I have a Blackberry and am forced to have a data plan (AT&T does the same thing) even though I would prefer not to have one. With this graduated level of data plan, it would save me money every month since I make almost no use of data.

If you are a heavy iphone data user who also wants tethering, this is your best option:

1. Buy a free phone with 2 year contract from AT&T, a nokia or something, but make sure it doesn't require any kind of data/messaging plan.2. Add the $15 data unlimited plan to it3. Buy your iphone factory unlocked from europe/asia, not a jailbroken/unlocked AT&T phone from ebay! This step is important. The IMEI of the phone must not be in the AT&T iphone database, so they can't tell that you're using an iphone and change your plan.4. Jailbreak the iphone and install the unsigned AT&T carrier bundle that allows tethering.5. Take the sim card out of your free phone and put it in iphone.

My suggestion is already cheaper, and that's with using just 2GB/month. If you're a heavy user and use 4GB/month on the average, you'd pay:$199 + $65*24 = $1759

This is before any voice plan fees, which are the same for both plans. Also, a factory unlocked iphone can be sold for more money on ebay when you're done with it.As you can see, even if you use 2GB, my method works out to be cheaper, the savings add up substantially when you use more than 2GB

They do IMEI sweeps every other day or so. If your SIM card remains in an IMEI that comes up as an iPhone, you'll receive a text message letting you know that the iPhone data plan has been added to your account automatically.

You didn't pay attention to the 1 critical step...must be a non AT&T iphone (meaning a european version). This IMEI wouldn't register on AT&T's network, giving access to the $15 or $10 unlimited data plans (which is what I am doing, although not w/ a stupid iphone but with other smartphones).

Looks like I will be canceling my service after my wifes contract is up. While I understand the need to control costs there is no reason to have these limits so low. 5 gigs a month I would look at as acceptable. I will give them major props on the new overage policy however. Also 2 charge 20$ more a month for the privledge to use your phones full capabilities with tethering is a major issue in my book. It is also why I will be sticking with Windows Mobile 6.5 over an android which I would love to have.

The android did not support exchange properly until 2.2 and ATT tracks tethering on those and can charge additional also.I also need a keyboard as I do 30-50 emails a day and the creen is not ideal for that. WM 6.5 with HTC sense is very functional though

I am just glad i'm not living in the USA.. Those plans would be absolutely useless for me..The past 3 months i've used about 89GB of data on my iphone (tethered sometimes, but without jailbreak) so even the "big" 2 GB plan seems like nothing.. I really don't understand AT&T, but maybe im just used to the providers over here :)

Verizon and the Droid Incredible are looking better and better when my contract is up next month. AT&T really wants to lose customers it seems. For their sake, they better hope the next iPhone is spectacular.

I thought the 200MB might be worthwhile to lower the monthly bill a bit, but I checked my AT&T app, and apparently I've used 158mb and I'm only at 22/31 days in my billing cycle. That's just with fairly regular (non-tethering) smartphone use. I don't think I ever go over 400mb in a month, but if I go over 200mb enough, I might as well just stick with the Unlimited plan for $30.

You think you have the hottest smart phone on the market yet it already is on the crappiest phone carrier with a choked data plan especially in major cities, now you are going to have customers complaining about the pricing structure of the data plan. The lure of the unlimited data plan is now gone as well. Unless AT&T is giving you a cut of the data fees then ignore this comment.

Let me be the first to say.....ok, maybe not the first, maybe the 100,000th. The second verizon or sprint gets the iphone, I am bailing sooooooooooooo fast. You hear that ATT? Your crappy service, disconnected calls while I have 5 bars, and inability to talk on the phone in my apartment in the heart of the city will no longer be my problem. Also, I had no idea how much data I used because I have the unlimited plan. So i checked my account; I use about 400megs a month. That is 2x their "small data package", and I use the iphone VERY lightly for data. I'm actually amazed I use that much. Thank god they can't switch my unlimited data. Anyways, they better hold onto that Iphone, because once verizon gets it, bye bye.

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Well, I for one will not be supporting this by not getting a smart phone. I dont want to have to worry about bill fluctuations. these confusing brackets are a mess. I would much rather have a reasonable price per/Mb and just go pay as you go the whole way. I dont want my bill to be 15 or 25 Dollars for data one month only to jump 15 bucks because I went .01 Mb over. I will sit on the side lines. Besides, cell phone is a luxury I don't have to have one.

Exactly, its a luxury, that I have not gotten into. I look at what confusion my son has with his.Besides when I leave my house that's time for myself, no interruptions. Nothing is that important that my answering machine can't handle. Were already inundated with excessive noise all around us, so I like my quite time thankyou very much, so don't call me I'll call you.

My wife and I use less then 200mb and now we aren't stuck paying for a premium plan. Problem is with the ipad as books are only sold through the app. Also some apps are upward of 300mb so that seems like shooting themselves in the foot